


darling won't you ease my worried mind

by rohesia



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Jack and Anne own a tattoo parlour, John Silver-centric, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, and it stays unresolved because i'm an asshole, hints of Anne/Max/Eleanor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25508251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohesia/pseuds/rohesia
Summary: Flint has a mouth. Of course he has a mouth, John is painfully reminded of the fact every time the man opens it to reprimand him for doing something the wrong way, or simply for doing something, which he’s kind of got used to, what with sharing an apartment and a car and friends and a bathroom. Seriously it’s amazing he hasn’t noticed sooner. Flint uses lip balm, for fuck’s sake.John knows Flint has a fucking mouth; the thing is, before today - well, maybe before two weeks ago - John hadn’t noticed it was a pretty mouth. Like, pretty as a murder could be pretty, which is not pretty at all, but with Flint these kinds of things lose their original sense. The important thing is: James Flint’s mouth is pretty and. It’s there. Every hour of every day. Like constantly.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver
Comments: 14
Kudos: 50





	darling won't you ease my worried mind

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this thing like three years ago and then promptly forgot about it for some reason. Found it again today and thought might as well... This is just John Silver losing his mind over James Flint, so nothing entirely new. Oh, and they were roommates.
> 
> Title from: Layla by Derek and the Dominos

Flint has a mouth. Of course he has a mouth, John is painfully reminded of the fact every time the man opens it to reprimand him for doing something the wrong way, or simply for doing something, which he’s kind of got used to, what with sharing an apartment and a car and friends and a bathroom. Seriously it’s amazing he hasn’t noticed sooner. Flint uses lip balm, for fuck’s sake.

John knows Flint has a fucking mouth; the thing is, before today - well, maybe before two weeks ago - John hadn’t noticed it was a pretty mouth. Like, pretty as a murder could be pretty, which is not pretty at all, but with Flint these kinds of things lose their original sense. The important thing is: James Flint’s mouth is pretty and. It’s there. Every hour of every day. Like constantly. 

A problem. An insidious one. A goddamn inconvenience when everything about James Flint screams everything but pretty. Except his mouth. And his wrists. Occasionally. When Flint is not wearing oversized shirts or sweaters with sleeves long enough to hide the entirety of his arms. John can still make out bones and tendons, though, moving sinuously and erupting in big, callous hands which haunt the nightmares of the bravest of men. 

But back to his mouth. John doesn’t have pretty words to describe it, to express what, exactly, a couple of weeks ago had prompted his eyes to fall on Flint’s lower lip, trapped between his teeth. He’d kept worrying at it, freeing it, passing his tongue over it and biting it again for quite some time, a man tormented.

He’d been reading one of his complicated, heavy tomes, maybe engaging in a mental discussion with the author or trying to find hidden meanings, and apparently he’d had to bite his lip swollen, red and glossy right in front of John, completely unaware of the effect and damningly composed in the aftermath of John’s utter wrecking. Attila himself would timidly retreat if faced with that kind of devastation. The kind that leaves everything unchanged on the outside and plunges deep into your body to shake its core, oblivious in how it threatens and thus much more lethal. Moving around that threat, unseen and unheard, is going to give John a heart attack. 

James Flint has a fucking mouth and it demands John’s undivided attention every time his eyes irresponsibly follow the curve of its lips instead of, well, doing anything else.

For example.

1

Flint brushes his thumb against his lips as he reads the morning newspaper, reading glasses making him look like the teacher John would have absolutely loathed in high school and who would have equally loathed him. 

He does that. Reading the newspaper in the morning with a cup of tea sitting on the table next to his elbow. Every morning. John gets up later and he’s usually in the shower while Flint prepares breakfast - they have a deal, Flint deals with breakfast, John with dinner - so the first thing he sees every morning when he walks into their small but still very dignified kitchen is Flint, impeccably dressed, chair almost parallel to the table, to allow his legs to comfortably stretch out in front of him. John would ask him to please place his chair so that its back faced the kitchen’s entrance, because since the unfortunate discovery, John has tripped on his feet every fucking morning, regularly caught unprepared by the sight of James Flint stroking his lip or dragging it down with his thumb as he reads and occasionally sighs or furrows his eyebrows, offended by something or confused by the presence of opinions that clash with his own in the national politics section. John is entirely too in love with life, desperately so, to make him notice the contradiction, and anyway it’d be like talking to a wall and watching it crumble on itself. 

“Shit, I forgot about…”

“Sugar, yes. You can use my honey, if you want.”

“I can’t believe the conversations we have sometimes. Also, honey? In my coffee? Not even Jack would try to sell that.”

Flint doesn’t answer and gets back to his reading, almost biting his thumb. John completely forgets about the honey and gulps down his coffee in one go, burning his tongue. It's just going to be one of those morning, isn't it.

2

Drinks with friends has apparently turned into How Can I Conceal A Boner While Decidedly Not Staring At My Roommate's Pretty Mouth? That's supposed to be his thing! Going out, being charming, having a good time, getting wasted, somehow getting back home without tripping and falling into an open manhole, making Flint grudgingly laugh with his exceptional if a little inappropriate sense of humor, destroying Jack at pool and dancing with Max when everyone else has stopped, either too drunk to move or placidly sitting somewhere in the gradually emptying bar with contented expressions.

He loves nights out, he shouldn't feel like any minute he might expose himself and... Jesus, and what?

“You look horrible,” Anne greets him, fingers of one hand wrapped around the neck of a beer bottle, the other holding a glass of soda she pushes on the counter, in John’s direction, because oh obviously he’s the designated driver tonight and obviously he can’t get smashed. John sneers and takes the glass with a mutinous look, which Anne ignores.

“Thank you, Anne, you don't look that good yourself.”

Anne sneers back and takes the bottle to her lips, leaning against the counter, an arm draped over it. It’s a miracle Max isn’t all over her already, John thinks. Respectfully. 

“Flint, though,” she says, tilting her head towards the little crowd that’s starting to form around Flint and Eleanor, happily playing darts and trying to outmatch one another. 

John doesn't catch himself fast enough and a frustrated sigh leaves his lips and shakes his shoulders. Fucking hell. Anne snorts.

“Knew it.”

“Max is having a terrible influence on you,” John drawls. 

Anne flips him the bird, then.“What're you gonna do?”

“About?”

Anne looks at him, unimpressed. John rolls his eyes and empties his glass. Jesus, cabs exist for a reason, he thinks, eyeing the bottle of vodka staring at him from behind the counter. Yes, they do, Max’s voice says, except our friends are animals. Point.

“Nothing. I don't wanna get stabbed.”

“So you're gonna die from blueballs?”

Okay, that’s low. 

“Flint isn't the only person in this bar,” John points out, looking both ways for the barman before climbing on the counter and snatching the bottle of vodka under Anne’s still unimpressed look. Whatever, they can take the tube or something and get fined for indecent behaviour, attempted murder or something. “Or in this city,” he adds, popping the bottle open and finally taking a long sip. “Or in this solar system. I can get laid whenever I want,” he grimaces, vodka setting his entire body on fire. He’s a shitty drinker and he knows it, but that’s an argument he’s only willing to have with his toilet.

“What, on this stool?” Anne remarks.

“I'm considering my options”.

“Yeah, your options”.

John makes an affronted face and turns on his stool, bottle of vodka hugged to his chest. He takes a look at the crowd, completely ignores Flint - who, by the way, is dancing to the same music he says he despises and his hips are dong something John has constant dreams about - and his eyes lands on Billy Bones, politely chatting with the club owner, probably refusing his job offer for the sixth time this month. Honestly, he’d make a terrible bouncer, letting minor right in because they laughed at his non-existent menacing aura. 

“Billy. What do you think of Billy?” John asks. Anne  _ levels  _ him.

“Me? You're asking me?”

John shrugs, conceding the point.

“Yeah, I mean… Objectively.”

Anne groans, though it sounds more like a snarl or something. 

“Ugh. If you like arms,” she replies, going green in the face and stealing John’s bottle from his hands, taking a long chug before smashing it back against his chest and shuddering. John is so so glad Max has expressly forbidden Anne from causing him bodily harm. Nothing serious anyway. 

“He has decent calves,” John adds, not helping his case a little. 

Of course that’s when Jack comes strolling in, a pink cocktail in his right hand and his phone in the other, while he takes a selfie, a demented look on his face. 

“Wow,” he says then “sounds hot, how are your pants not spontaneously ripping apart from sheer, uncontrolled lust”. 

“Very funny,” John mumbles. Then he hears Flint’s cavernous laugh and doesn’t look around, just lets the sound set his nerve endings on fire and headbutts the bar counter. Twice, for good measure.

When John finally abandons his vodka bottle in Anne’s more than happy hands and unburies a rumpled fifty from his jean’s pocket, which he hands with a handsome smile to a not entirely surprised Doug, he decides: what the hell. I’m drunk, I’m young, I’m pretty, I’m not rotting on a fucking stool. Then Flint is in front of him, like he’s just sprung out of the ground (entirely possible), all sweaty and smiling and disheveled, his aftershave turning John’s synapses into cowering retreating soldiers and abandoning him. 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink,” Flint says, blinding smile still stamped on his mouth, reaching his eyes. His lips are red, probably because he’s been running his tongue and biting into them all day, like usual, and looking positively sinful. 

“The tube isn’t that crowded at five in the morning,” John shoots back. It’s not like they’re going to have the police called on them if there’s barely anyone around even bothering to lift their drunk faces to look at, like, Eleanor going down on Anne while Max stands guard or Jack pole dancing or John dying of lust while Flint just sits, dreaming about coffee or a good book or some shit. 

They don’t say anything for a few seconds, just look at each other like they’re in some Austen movie and the entire room magically empties out. Flint’s smile begins to waver, his lip setting into an almost straight line. They’re slightly parted, like he’s out of breath even though he’s been standing still for the last two minutes. 

John begins to bury his teeth into his own lip, music gradually flintering back in and the voices and laughter of their friends sounding like a distant reminder of… something, he doesn’t know what exactly. He doesn’t remember anything about anything at all, Flint fills up his entire world, just standing there on the dirty floor, blinding lights and sudden darkness enveloping him as John feels like crumbling down.

So he just says it, like he’s done a thousand times before, just not like this, his body moving just a little - too much - closer than he’d normally be comfortable with, his hand brushing Flint’s forearms - of course he’s rolled his sleeve up to his elbow, of fucking course - and says, whispering it really.

“Wanna dance?”

3

John is going through his notifications on his piece of crap of a phone - it’s a miracle he manages to read through anything, what with the shattered screen and the duck tape holding it together by some kind of miracle - when Flint enters Jack’s and Anne’s tattoo parlour, the little bell on top of the door announcing him. 

John smells him before he sees him and his brain shuts down, definitely not because he’d just been staring, obsessively, at a picture Max had taken the other night: Flint smiling, all teeth, looking like war and devastation (so nothing new), eyes a startling green even in the shitty lights of the shitty club they’d hit after getting kicked out of the first - second? He’s staring at something outside the frame and he looks like he doesn’t have a single worry, shoulders slightly slumped like he’s about to lean his head down to stifle a laugh in Eleanor’s shoulder, who's standing right next to him, head throw back and laughing. Goddamn it he’s hot. 

And also, standing right there in front of him… with a split, bloody lip. Which. Holy fuck. It should say something about his character - and prompt him to, like, get a fucking grip - when he thinks: that looks like something out of a fashion magazine - and not: that must hurt, also, what happened? But in his short, if eventful, life he has managed to remain impervious to any and all critical observation about his non-existent qualms, so. 

That’s probably why, as he desperately and inconspicuously tries to cross his leg while sitting on a stool thought for people twice his height and almost falls backwards on Jack’s working, expensive, instruments, he says:

“Well, shit, who pissed you off?” a brilliant smile on his face, if a little hysterical. 

The stains of blood peppering the collar of Flint’s white (tight, oh my god) shirt shouldn’t look so engrossing but. John never even tried to appeal to his sense of shame once in his life. Sometimes he wonders how he has any friends - no he doesn’t, Max does for him, but that’s almost the same thing. Anyway.

Flint literally electrocutes him with a look before slamming the door shut, the little bell giving an alarmed jingle that sounds like John’s brain (Max) screaming “Are you for fucking real?”. 

“Walked into Vane on my way to lunch.”

“What, literally?”

Flint just rolls his eyes, visibly fighting the urge to smash his face into his hands and just… groan loudly. Then he starts going through Jack’s drawers - Jack gave up months ago and simply put on a sign that says “NOT THE FUCKING CHERRY-FLAVOURED LUBE” in capital, bright red letters. In fully display. For everyone to see. And they give John grief about his non-existent shame.  _ Honestly. _

After having shoved the  _ fucking cherry-flavoured lube _ in his jeans back pocket - not because he uses it, at least this John can attest to with a fair amount of certainty, what with living with the guy and knowing for sure the only thing fucking him is the daily headache John rewards him with for simply breathing - just to piss off Jack, Flint sighs and sits on the stool right next to John, a cloth in one hand and disinfectant (mustn’t have found any whiskey) in the other. He gives another sigh - like he literally didn’t start the fight, John just fucking knows he did - and sprays himself in the face with the disinfectant bottle held high above his head, because that’s just normal behaviour. 

Sometimes John cannot believe this is the same guy who irons his boxers. 

After having dried out the disinfectant from his entire face, except where it’s frizzling on his still bloody, fucking gorgeous lip, he gets up again and goes to the little sink mostly hidden in a corner of the parlour and holds the cloth under the the jet of water. His ass looks incredible in those jeans, John thinks, especially since Flint wears jeans once in a blue moon. John immediately looks up when Flint turns around, wet cloth pressed against his neck where blood has trickled down (or maybe it’s the other guy’s blood, who knows).

“You need a hand?”  _ What. What? _

Flint’s eyes flicker in his direction, contemplating. He’s still pressing the wet cloth against his neck, trying to wash away the bloodstains and doing a terrible job, apparently not even trying, since he’s been rubbing at the same, spotless sliver of skin like he wants to draw blood and not clean it away. Then he shrugs and nods, handing John the cloth. John has a minor heart attack but all in all makes a fine job concealing it. 

Cloth in hand, John turns around on his stool towards Flint, back straining because the asshole doesn’t bother to move, just remains still like he’s the king of fucking England - John hope, intensely, that Flint can’t read his mind. So he doesn’t have any choice but to brace a hand on one of Flint’s thigh while he touches the cloth to his neck, which he bared slightly, thanks ever so. It doesn’t immediately register how Flint literally just bared his throat to him, but when it does John is too busy not falling out of the stool to have an aneurism.

He delicately strokes Flint’s neck, focusing on the blood, not the heat radiating from his skin. He almost takes a nosedive right into Flint’s still bared throat and, attempting to regain his balance, the hand resting on Flint’s tight travels higher and instinctively squeezes. He thinks he imagines it when Flint goes rigid, but he doesn’t imagine his lips slightly opening to release an imperceptible - almost - sigh. And it doesn’t carry the same annoyed quality with it as his previous ones. It’s like he didn’t even mean to. 

And John, fighting his better instincts, like the ones telling him to please try and stay alive, lowers his face to hide a surprised smile that, tries as he might, won’t turn into a smirk, and repositions the cloth currently travelling along Flint’s neck so that his fingers (not) inadvertently brush against Flint’ jaw. 

Flint literally jolts this time, but doesn’t say anything, either dumb to John’s intentions - hardly believable - or entertained enough by the game that he’s willing to let John believe he can carry on and remain in control. 

“There’s some blood on your chin, right under your lips,” John informs him, daring, tone deliberately flat.  _ Want me to take care of that as well _ he doesn’t need to add. Flint’s mouth quivers, either in surprise or amusement. Possibly both. 

“Go ahead,” he says then, voice low, raw. John swallows.  _ Control my ass. _

Unfortunately, Jack picks that exact moment to enter the room, already rambling about demanding customers and, thank god, reading the room like a two year old on a sugar high. John stifles a groan and tries to remember what exactly his opinion on first degree murder is while Flint retrieves the cloth from his hand and throws it in Jack’s face before getting up from his stool and stalking out of the parlour without a word.

“Must be a Thursday,” Jack mutters, dumping the cloth in a bin. 

John finally groans, the reality of what just happened smashing into him and leaving him reeling, and gets up. 

“Fuck you, Jack,” he says, bell jingling and agreeing.

“Definitely a Thursday”.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! All and any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. Bye <3


End file.
